Twenty-nine percent of organizations with 500 or fewer employees use social media to promote their companies. The number is higher for companies with 501 to 1,000 employees (38 percent) and companies with more than 1,000 workers (44 percent).

Forty-three percent of respondents say their marketing department handles social media outreach, followed by public relations (26 percent) and human resources (19 percent). (This mirrored results of a recent Digital Brand Expressions survey in which 71 percent of respondents said marketing was responsible for creating and maintaining a social media communications plan, followed by public relations (29 percent).

Maybe it's no big deal, but another stat from CareerBuilder.com bothered me a bit. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said they didn't know how many employees were communicating on behalf of their organization through social media. A quarter of them said they had one to three people doing so, 7 percent said four or five folks are involved, and 11 percent said more than six people fill a communications role.

I'm not really troubled by the fact that so many companies can't answer this. It's hard to say due to the wording of the question (as "on behalf of'" does imply folks acting in an official capacity), but I think it may be an honest acknowledgement that employees sometimes communicate about a company on their own time. (That's one of the factors that makes it tough to create a good social media policy.)

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